The more that I dive into the quest of having my own spot on the internet, the more that I find that I have things that I want to do with it. Which means more research, experiments and late nights.

Currently, I'm on a mission to get webmentions and pingback working on my site. It's been pretty slow going because I want to incorporate it into my current blogging workflow. A workflow that is currently not flowing at all1.

Anyway, I thought I'd focus on making some changes so that I can make it fit better with all the new stuff that is coming out for the indieweb.

Setting up sign in

The first thing to do is make some changes to my template to allow for sign up according to the web directions

I thought the easiest ways of doing this was to use github2 or twitter3. I pushed the github login near the top of the page so that it would look for it first.

I've got three places that I can sit down and make a blog post. My iPhone, my iMac, and my laptop. Currently, my favorite is my laptop but I don't take it everywhere or use it as much. My mind is having trouble just feeling comfortable writing recently. Add the complication of where the files should be saved and how to update previous posts and I start feeling like throwing my hands up. ↩

Which was just bought by Microsoft a couple month ago. I don't know if it's the new Microsoft which is pro open source. ↩

Previously, I had written about how I found a solution to my compulsion to make sure that the headers on my blog were on the write2 level here.

As with so many other things in life, there was an easier1 solution that was built into python-markdown.

When I had first explored this issue, I had looked at the HeaderID it was marked as being deprecated and to be used for adding anchors for headings. I didn't read the whole thing because it didn't seem it would fit my needs. I continued on and found my current solution.

But, the thought that there could be a better way kept on nagging me even though I was happy3 with how my site turned out.

In my last post, I left off with a list of things that I wanted to work on for the next release of the design of the blog. I'm still changing the header at the top of the page and I've been working on improving the contrast of the colors you see for links to make it easier to read. Something you can't spot just by looking is the fact that <h1> - <h3> tags don't correspond to the breakdown of the syntax of the rest of the site.

A small sample of the code that was being generated.

What do I see on the internet

I feel that a lot of the sites that are on the internet only use the <h1>, <h2>, <h3> tags and looking at some of the templates that I've come across for pelican use css classes to differentiate them in the design.

I don't have a problem with that, but I felt that it doesn't help those that might be using some kind of screen reader or parsing system1.

Searching for a solution

Once again, I started looking for a place where this had already been fixed and quickly found one that would make sure that the html that python-markdown would give me would match what I was expecting to give to my template.

But there are further complications

Unfortunately, pelican has changed since the original and I wasn't able to get the solution to work. The readme says to add the following:

MD_EXTENSIONS=['downheader']

But the latest documentation found here, have the markdown default to be defined as a dictionary and not an array2. The simplest way to get it to work is to change your pelicanconfig.py to have the following code.

I've since made a pull request so that others can get around this as well.

Conclusion

I'm happier and happier with the way that the site is coming together, but I'm afraid of the amount of technical debt that the site is accruing as I go along. I've to to make the readme a priority for those who come after me and want to make this design better.

I've also taken some time to just take the header and just make a standalone project that demonstrates how it works. I points to the simple theme that comes with pelican so people can just download it after installing pelican, python-markdown and the mdx_downheader package.

From what I've seen a lot of webcrawlers use the headers of a page to determine whether a site was worth putting in search results. ↩

This isn't the only place that has this, but I've been having trouble just getting the projects that I am using up to date. Heck, my readme is one line at this point! ↩

Implementing microblogging in pelican

This one was pretty interesting in that it was the first link in my search and let me know that it was indeed possible. Unfortunately, the site has moved from pelican to hugo and I couldn't find the theme in the users github repository (unless he's renamed it).

Microblogging with pelican

Link
This link seems a little more promising as the writer is still actively using pelican to generate her site. Not only that but she has a couple example iOS workflows that give me ideas on how to quickly generate posts for the site.

Currently, I don't have any bandwidth to do any of these options in the next couple of days, but I hope that by writing about them here someone else can use them to make their site better.

When I'm trying to come up with a new theme for my blog, I like to think about the different scenerios of what I can put together. I admit that a lot of what I design is rarely shown in my daily writing, but I like the possibilities of expressing myself in this way and part of me hopes that someone else will see my theme and use it or make it better.

In light of this, I don't like using my own content sometimes because I don't always have something recent to test with a theme with.

That's why I took some time and created a repo just for this purpose. I present:

It's a couple of articles and pages that I use to simulate a website in pelican. It looks like most of the theme designers create their own set of test data but I'm hoping that this can be the seed or at least add on to whatever else is available.